Hogs Battle Pet Removed

Hogs, created as a "decoy" pet in early alpha datamining, is confirmed to be removed for Warlords' launch. Previously Hogs has been associated with several beta achievements, including WoW's 10th anniversary.

Site Updates

Warlords of Draenor data improvements continue on Wowhead, here are some of the more interesting things we've done in the past few days!

Our Building database was one of the first Garrison sections we added to Wowhead, and we decided it was time to spruce it up. You can now also browse building by their in-game images for the Alliance and Horde! These images can be sorted by Name, Plot Size, and Level.

With LFR, Normal, and Heroic raids having flexible raid sizes in 6.0, ranging from 10-30 players, we've enabled spell scaling our boss ability pages. Underneath a spell tooltip, you can select your raid difficulty and then move the slider to the appropriate number of people in your raid. The below screenshots use Molten Torrent as an example:

To recap raid changes in 6.0:

Flexible SoO raids are being renamed Normal and scale from 10 to 30 players.

Normal SoO raids are being renamed Heroic and scale from 10 to 30 players.

Heroic SoO raids are being renamed Mythic and are fixed at 20 players--no 10 and 25 player versions.

Engine Evolution in Warlords of Draenor

Blizzard

Welcome to the first in an ongoing series of programming- and engineering-focused articles that, over time, will cover some of the technical nuts and bolts that go into creating and running World of Warcraft.

Before we kick this first one off, a quick warning: What follows is a fairly technical explanation for a graphical-setting change related to anti-aliasing. Most of you probably won’t notice any difference at all—this is primarily for those who tend to tinker with their hardware and graphical settings.

In short, we’re taking strides to improve the performance of World of Warcraft, while also ensuring there’s plenty of potential to further increase graphical fidelity and enhance our support of high-end CPUs and graphics hardware.

For Warlords of Draenor, we made a decision to remove Multisample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) and instead include a new anti-aliasing technology called Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing (CMAA). This change is going to allow us to bring some overdue technological advancements to World of Warcraft over the course of the next few years—we’re thinking long-term with this change.

One reason MSAA remained viable for WoW over the past decade was that the GPU had the time and resources to handle it. WoW has been a CPU-bound game for much of its lifetime, but during the Warlords development cycle, we endeavored to change that. A lot of that work involved analyzing the flow of data through our code and making sure we work on only what we need to for any given frame. One example is we now variably reduce the number of bones that need to be animated based on proximity and view (sometimes called level of detail, or LOD), a primary consumer of CPU time. We’ve also added a job system that the engine uses to task out animation and scene management in ways we had prototyped in Patch 5.4, but are expanding in Warlords.

The outcome of all of this is that more than ever before, World of Warcraft relies heavily on a GPU that previously was largely free to handle things like MSAA. We explored a number of options to reconcile this increased GPU demand with the game’s anti-aliasing needs, and ultimately decided to embrace CMAA as our anti-aliasing technology for Warlords of Draenor. As with anything that can potentially change the look of the game, we vetted removing MSAA through our engineering and art teams before coming to the conclusion to swap it for CMAA. CMAA provides solid anti-aliasing at a fraction of the cost in memory and performance. It also integrates well with technologies we have planned for the future, and helps us bring those to the game sooner. We also support FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing), an even lighter-weight solution, as an option for our players using DirectX 9.

CMAA fulfills our goals of providing high-quality anti-aliasing at reduced performance cost, while giving us the extra headroom we need to further improve the graphical fidelity of the game. We don’t have to make any architectural concessions within the engine for CMAA to work, and for Warlords of Draenor we’ve already been able to implement new graphical features like target outlining, soft particles, a new shadowing technique, and refraction—and more graphical features are on the horizon for future patches and expansions.

For the launch of Warlords of Draenor, CMAA is the top-tier graphical setting available, but after release we’ll be exploring more options for players with high-performance graphics cards—and if they provide quality while still fitting into our future technology plans, we’ll take a serious look at adding them to the game.

The graphical future of World of Warcraft is a bright one, and the changes we’ve made during the development of Warlords of Draenor have laid the groundwork for us to continue making the game look better and better far into the future.

Thanks for reading!

Upcoming Mistweaver Changes

Celestalon

Hey again. Wanted to pop back in and let you know about an upcoming change that we're making to help out with how unreliable Mistweaver AoE healing feels.

Renewing Mist will now jump to the lowest health target within 20 yards.

Still prioritizes targets that don't already have Renewing Mist on them over those that do.

now simply increases the max jump range to 40 yards.

It's important to note that this is a not an indication of us returning to having a lot of smart heals. But in this specific circumstance, we believe that it's the right course of action. This should ensure that Renewing Mist and Uplift healing is consistently effective, while still being uncontrolled.

Upcoming Warrior Changes

Celestalon

Hey Fury Warriors.

There's no doubt that this beta has had quite a lot of turmoil for Fury. I'd like to talk about an upcoming change that is surely going to be controversial.

"A furious berserker wielding a weapon in each hand, unleashing a flurry of attacks to carve his opponents to pieces."

What sorts of gameplay do you think of when you read that description?

To us, it means “relentlessly dishing out attacks as fast as you're able”. Not “conserving your resources to tactically use controlled attacks”, which is more of Arms or Protection’s style – Fury is all about pure, unbridled bloodlust.

We've had a lot of problems with the rotation and talent combinations, and most of it comes down to interactions with Colossus Smash. Fury's rotation is heavily influenced by Colossus Smash, almost entirely in ways that go completely against the true spirit of being a Fury Warrior. Colossus Smash very much epitomizes Arms’ style, not Fury’s. So, a long-term goal of ours has been to transition Fury out of Colossus Smash.

We had been planning to try to fix these rotational problems primarily with small changes over time (which we viewed as “bandaids” to some extent), and then eventually remove Colossus Smash. But, that would involve significant changes down the road, adding even more turmoil to the future of Fury. We'd rather get everything done now, instead of changing this up on you every couple of patches. So, we've decided to 'rip the bandaid off' now, so to speak. In the next build, you'll find that Colossus Smash is Arms-only.

This is not something we're doing lightly. We believe that the added complexity of the new talents will ensure that Fury stays engaging, and results in a theme-matching gameplay experience, where you're attacking in a frenzy, and reacting to procs. We'll be keeping an eye on whether the gameplay remains complex enough to satisfy players, and make changes to ensure that if need be. This is definitely more disruption, and we realize that you guys are looking for a stable platform to play on; we just think that it'll be better to get the whole disruption out of the way now, instead of doing some now, and then having to go through it all again in the future.

This is clearly a significant change to the core gameplay style of Fury. We know that some of you have grown to enjoy the pool + dump style of gameplay. And that's great; we think that pooling and dumping Rage and procs during the right time is a very solid gameplay style. But it's not the right style for Fury. We encourage those of you who really like this gameplay style to try out Arms and Gladiator (which is a fully-competitive DPS spec now). And we encourage Arms and Gladiator Warriors who disliked that gameplay to try out Fury as well. This is certainly going to result in some reshuffling of where many Warriors' preferred specs lay, and that's OK.

Comments

Comment by jglonek

So, are the normal/heroic flex size changes only for Orgrimmar and Warlords content or is it for older content as well?

Comment by Edawan

on 2014-09-17T12:24:26-05:00

CMAA is a lot worse than the current MSAA. So disappointed with this change.

Comment by Lucid

on 2014-09-17T12:24:32-05:00

"ranging from 10-30 players" - did I miss something? are (previously flex) raids going to go up to 30 now?

Comment by perculia

on 2014-09-17T12:25:32-05:00

Normal (currently Flex) and Heroic (currently Normal) are going up to 30 now. Mythic (formerly Heroic) is fixed at 20.

Comment by Tritox

on 2014-09-17T12:33:25-05:00

Building gallery view rocks! \\m/

Comment by Winfree

on 2014-09-17T12:35:00-05:00

" We also support FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing), an even lighter-weight solution, as an option for our players using DirectX 9."This is one of the reason why I play on & off so many years. I always appreciate the facts that Blizzard look out for those that can't afford a high-end PC. Keep up the good work. (:

Comment by Nulgar

on 2014-09-17T13:08:46-05:00

So, are the normal/heroic flex size changes only for Orgrimmar and Warlords content or is it for older content as well?

Only Siege of Orgrimmar and later. Older raids are unaffected and retain their previous modes of Normal and, if applicable, Heroic, with a respective maximum group size of 10 or 25.

Comment by perculia

on 2014-09-17T13:18:11-05:00

Yep, if you visit a boss ability for an old raid that's in the Dungeon Journal, you'll see that the difficulty options for the tooltip are the Legacy options.

Comment by GustoGA

on 2014-09-17T13:23:28-05:00

It's confusing the way it was written. Its a minimum of 10 players up to a maximum of 30 players. I can see that new terminology "scale up to" as something you can gloss over. When I first heard it I thought 10-man or 30-man raiding. The new design is so if you are short people or have extras you should be able to raid SCALING from 10 and up to 30 players in the raid.

Comment by KimaEri

on 2014-09-17T13:35:08-05:00

I feel special, being on the front page. Surprisingly no flood of followers.

Comment by thomassie12

on 2014-09-17T15:05:51-05:00

I hope they will make good graphical changes, I invested in a good GPU so maybe i can put it to work :D.

Comment by Interest

on 2014-09-17T15:15:31-05:00

"ranging from 10-30 players" - did I miss something? are (previously flex) raids going to go up to 30 now?

Considering that Mythic is 20 players and thus the average value between 10 and 30 I guess it makes sense to change the upper limit from 25 to 30.

Also, I must've missed something earlier because I wasn't aware of all non-Mythic difficulties becoming Flexible...because that is a rather elegant choice considering raiding was reaching the point of having many, many tiers of difficulty (not to mention I'm pretty sure Flexible to a point is about as "difficult" as normal with 10 people).

Comment by Nunyabrew

on 2014-09-17T15:31:23-05:00

So disappointed about the hogger pet :( hope it makes another appearance soon.

Comment by Dogey

on 2014-09-17T15:55:02-05:00

i like new site updetes and i wait NEW Build !

Comment by saintcopy

on 2014-09-17T17:07:59-05:00

Will there ever be any options for racial customization for garrisons? I love the orcs and all but would rather have buildings that my forsaken brothers built.

Comment by rhostam

on 2014-09-17T17:57:35-05:00

Oh, this would be very nice indeed. Getting to choose architectural style of a building from available faction races would definitely make your garrison more personal.

Comment by Xbowhyena

on 2014-09-17T18:38:54-05:00

*desire to weave mists intensifies*

Comment by helladin

on 2014-09-17T20:37:14-05:00

so basicly they want to say bb to 10 man heroic raiding guilds.end of expansion find 10 more player wont be happen.why blizard hates this much 10 man raiding.most boss eaiser at 25 man. and now this.

Comment by WhiteWoof

on 2014-09-18T03:51:52-05:00

To be honest, it'd be even better if they could dump DirectX and start using OpenGL instead. DX just sucks :<

Comment by oa127

on 2014-09-18T14:06:56-05:00

I hope they will make good graphical changes, I invested in a good GPU so maybe i can put it to work :D.

I see lots of complaints against CMAA, but with my inboard GPU, the comparisons are non-existant. There are some youtube viseos about it.

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